Thoughts on Perl and Emacs, technology and writing

Devel::REPL – a Perl Read Eval Print Loop

I’m somewhat amused at one of the more recent comments here – Nathan L. Walls defends his "choice" of Ruby with some very woolly justifications (emphasis mine):

"Ruby’s community feels more vibrant. No, not something you can measure. It is a feeling."

"Yes, there are equivalents in Perl, but they are far rougher. Again, not really measurable, but a feeling."

Of course, his day job is still writing Perl. Moving swiftly on…

Devel::Repl

The main thing I got out of the comment apart from a chuckle, was it motivated me to look at Devel::REPL.

One of the other main tools in my toolbox is emacs and when writing emacs lisp, I make full use of the REPL. But I’ve never even wanted an equivalent in Perl.

One cpanm invocation later and I’m ready.

Wait, no I’m not. I copied Caleb’s repl.rc config to make it more usable. I added MultiLine::PPI which resulted in a bunch of errors at start-up. It turns out I need to add File::Next and B::Keywords separately.

I had always used perl -d -e 1 too. It looks like there are some advantages to using re.pl if you like that sort of thing though.

@Anonymous – I’ll take a look at those. Thanks for the tip.

@garu – yes I noticed that the prompt hadn’t changed. However, clearly the re.pl has done the wrong thing. I didn’t finish the statement with a semi-colon so it should have been able to detect the continuation.